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The Music in It

Saturday, November 30, 2013

This week, I’m especially happy to post an essay by Michael
T. Young—a poet whose work I greatly respect and admire. Michael has published
three poetry collections: Transcriptions
of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), Because
the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press), and Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press). His fourth
collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being
Lost, will be published in 2014 by Poets Wear Prada Press. He received a fellowship
from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was twice nominated for a
Pushcart Prize. He was runner-up for a William Stafford Award and recipient of
the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Fogged Clarity, Louisville Review, Off the
Coast, The Potomac Review, and The
Raintown Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a
Ghost, In the Black/In the Red
and forthcoming in Rabbit Ears: TV Poems.
Michael lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.

I
have always believed that love is, by definition, creative and that true creativity,
likewise, is loving. This belief is conveniently circular, but then again, so
are some symbols of love and eternal life like the wedding ring and the
Ouroboros. Like the circle, love is what repeats itself because love is what we
wouldn't want any other way. But what binds us into these circular love affairs
are not seamless, hence the constant misunderstandings of love and art.

Generally,
our relationship with art is as clumsy as our relationship with other
people:we trap ourselves in what
we mean to each other. But love is not only defined by what someone means to us
but by the freedom we grant them to be and become themselves.

To
love is to pay attention to the highest degree. Such attention is what the
lover gives to his beloved and what the artist gives to his creation. He
willingly gives his time and energy, the substance of his life, to bring
something into existence. Lack of attention is what renders a manufactured
product meaningless. Invented for profit, pieced together by machines, our
commodities posses function but not meaning.Meaning is not a mechanism an artist puts into a work of art
but arises through the love he invests in it.The artist creates a vehicle through which something comes
into a meaningful existence. Thus his attention is a kind of obedience to an
inspiration, which he allows to define itself. Of course, the meaning of an
artwork has limitations. No single work of art can mean everything at once. But
then again, every single artwork tends to resist reduction to a singular
meaning. If a poem or painting would impart its meaning to us it demands in
return no less than that we live with it. It demands that we give it attention,
the freedom to continually redefine or clarify itself.

So
even for the reader of a poem or observer of a painting, it is the sustained
attention he gives to it that will reveal its meaning. But it isn't something
that once seen is fully had, like understanding the function of something, such
as how a hammer works. For the one who experiences a work of art, meaning is
the perspective he gains on himself and the world through transcendence in the
work of art. It is what Shelley called, "morals" in his Defense of Poetry when he said:

The
great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action,
or person, not our own.

The
moment one assumes full understanding of a work of art or a person, one has
effectively locked them in the past. When you look at them, you will see them
as they were but not as they are or as they are becoming. To pay attention to
someone or something, to love someone or something is to continually extend to
them the freedom to renew themselves in your eyes without jeopardizing what they
have always meant to you. In this way
one's perspective grows. It is what makes friendship and love profound. It is
the depth perception of the mind's eye.

But
the horizon sets limits even on perfect vision and nothing shrinks the world's
horizons faster than pain. When Dante Gabriel Rossetti saw his wife in her
coffin, he placed a collection of his poems into it with her. It was the only
perfect copy of his poems and only existed because she had asked him to write
them down. Silence followed him out of the room and through the next seven
years. Through that time his friends, people like Swinburne, William Morris,
and George Meredith became famous poets and novelists. Finally, Rossetti had
his wife's coffin exhumed and the poems retrieved. They were published eight
years after her death.One could
argue that Rossetti retrieved the poems to achieve fame. But that would require
ignoring what inspired those poems: the love not just for his wife, Elizabeth,
but for the life in her. What calls forth song is not just love but a love for
life, whether it's the life one loves in another or in one's own day to day. When
the life he loved died in Elizabeth, he felt it founder in himself. He felt a
pain for the loss, a tear in the fabric of what he was. With that he threw the
poems into the coffin with the spent life that inspired them. But he continued
to feel pain and only the living feel pain. When life had stretched that pain
thin over the years and Dante stared into it, what he saw was the blank page he
was returning to life instead of the love he truly felt. He had to retrieve
from the dead what belonged to the living.

Blake
said, "Life delights in life." As many poems that have been written
for the beloved, whether man or woman, there have also been many inspired by
other art works: symphonies inspired by poems, poems inspired by paintings,
paintings inspired by paintings, paintings inspired by poems or philosophy. It
is life delighting in life, the motion of love, a circling of life back to
itself creating a place for us to mean something to each other. It is also the
frame around a painting, the margins around the poem.

Note: When I asked Michael if he had a poem that
expressed something of his essay’s spirit, his response was, It occurred to me that my poem “The Word
‘Anyway’” would make a perfect accompanying piece to the essay. This poem
embodies and enacts the idea that the essay states as love and attention being
a constant extension of the freedom of renewal without jeopardizing existing
meaningfulness.

The Word “Anyway”

Every time I write it’s there at the end of my
paragraphs,

so much so, my friends see it as a kind of signature
word,

and I realize that whatever it means, it is, in any
case,

like a ramp off the highway leading me somewhere
else.

And where it takes me, regardless, turns and carries
the letter,

the conversation, the e-mail, in another direction,
though not,

necessarily, in a better one—the detour this time
taken

to wrench the heart from its daily obsessions,

which is to say, I wasn’t trying to take us to our
destination faster,

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Here in the U.S., Thanksgiving Day takes place on November 28
this year, which also happens to be the first full day of Hanukkah, and my birthday. Thanksgiving, for me, has always been the unofficial start of the Christmas season, and my house is already decorated (including my giant Christmas tree and three smaller ones). Needless to say, it’s all wonderful, and after church in the early AM, I’ll be home cooking dinner and
then feasting with friends. My birthday “cake” will be a large pumpkin pie! In
lieu of a Thanksgiving/Hanukkah week prompt or essay, following are some lovely
poems that speak to these special holidays. Even if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving
or Hanukkah this week, I hope you’ll enjoy the poems and keep in mind that it’s
always a good time to remember the things, people, blessings, and gifts for
which we’re thankful.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Here we are
in mid-November, approaching the most festive, celebratory, and busiest time of
year. It occurs to me that many of us won’t have time to work with prompts or
on our poems, so I thought I’d offer slightly different fare for a while—some
poetry-related reading and then a short hiatus in December. For starters, I’d
like to share an interview that I did with the great poet Charles Simic. This
appeared in issue XXIII of Tiferet (autumn
2013)and is reprinted here with the
permission of publisher Donna Baier Stein. There are some great tips for poets from
Charles Simic at the end of the interview.

An Interview with Charles Simic

Dušan
[Charles] Simićwas born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on May 9, 1938. His memories,
as he noted for this interview “… begin
with April 6, 1941 when he was three years old, when a German bomb hit the
building across the street from his and threw him out of bed at five o’clock in
the morning …” During World War II, his father was arrested several
times and in 1944 fled from Yugoslavia to Italy, where he was again imprisoned.
At the end of the war, he went to Trieste where he lived for five years before
making his way to the United States. Simic’s mother attempted to escape postwar
Yugoslavia but was imprisoned with Charles and his younger brother by the
Communists. Charles, his brother, and his mother ultimately moved to Paris,
where they lived for a year before emigrating to the United States in 1954
where they joined Charles’s father after a decade apart.

The family lived in New York for
a year before moving to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park where Simic graduated
from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. His first poems were published
in the Chicago Review in 1959.
Working nights at the Chicago Sun Times, he attended the University of Chicago
but, in 1961, was drafted into the US Army and served until 1963. In 1964, he
married fashion designer Helen Dubin, with whom he has a son and a daughter. He
earned a bachelor’s degree from NYU in 1966, and his first poetry collection, What the Grass Says, was published in
1967. He became a US citizen in 1971 and taught at the University of New
Hampshire for 34 years. He and his wife live in Strafford, New Hampshire.

Prolific as well as acclaimed,
Charles Simic has published over sixty books in the U.S. and abroad. In
addition to being a distinguished poet, he is also an eminent translator,
essayist, critic, and editor. A 1990 Pulitzer Prize recipient, he was elected a
Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He has received numerous
awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur
Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as the
United States Poet Laureate from 2007–2008 and, among other honors and awards,
he has received the PEN Translation Prize, the International Griffin Poetry
Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Frost Medal.

Imagistic and terse, Charles
Simic’s poetry is characterized by dark imagery and incongruity—a stunning
blend of originality and genius that produces a style unmatched in contemporary
poetry. A post-modernist and a surrealist, Simic is also a minimalist who trims
away everything “extra” to create a streamlined effect
intensified by surprising concurrences of language and imagery. His poetry is
like waking in a darkened room and unexpectedly recognizing the strangeness in
familiar furniture forms.

_______________

Adele Kenny: My mother’s family came from Eastern Europe
and suffered greatly during the First World War. (My grandfather spent six and
a half years in a Siberian prison camp.) When they came to this country, my
grandparents and my uncles (who were children) felt an enormous sense of
displacement. Did you feel similarly when you came to this country and, if so,
did that make itself felt in your poetry?

Charles Simic: Not in my case. I was sixteen years old when
I came in 1954 with my mother and younger brother to join my father, whom we
had not seen since 1944, so it was a happy occasion. Plus, everything that I
was in love with, American literature, jazz, movies and girls, were waiting for
me in New York City. Neither then, nor now, have I had any nostalgia for
Europe.

AK: How have the darknesses of your childhood in Belgrade, such
experiences as being a drafted into the U.S. army and serving as a military
policeman in France and Germany, and Eastern Europe’s past impacted your
poetry?

CS: Growing up in wartime, being bombed, seeing atrocities, going hungry
and spending a little time in prison shaped my outlook on life. My poems are
full of allusions to such experiences, not just mine, but to those of many
other human beings in other wars and other times.

AK: How are you “the last Napoleonic soldier?”

CS: I and my family belong to the great masses of defeated humanity who
fought in every war in history without wanting to and came back home either in
a coffin or without an arm or a leg. When I wrote that poem this destiny of ours
struck me as very funny.

AK: As a Post-Modernist poet, you successfully avoid the obsessive
biographical preoccupation with “I” and “me” that has dominated poetry in
recent years. How do nonrepresentational awareness and personal experience
co-exist in your poetry?

CS: A poem is a work of art made up of imagination and reality. I’m more
interested in writing a good poem then telling the reader about myself. Of
course, I use my own experiences, but I also make up things.

AK: It has been remarked that your style is characterized by simplicity
and strangeness with an unsettling quality. Dark imagery and irony are seen in
many of your poems, along with nods to the surreal and to the farcical. How do
you view these elements as characteristic of your work?

CS: This is how I see the world. As someone whose memories begin with
April 6, 1941 when he was three years old, when a German bomb hit the building
across the street from his and threw him out of bed at five o’clock in the
morning, this is an inevitable condition. My parents, grandparents, uncles and
aunts were the same way. History has made us into a family of cheerful
pessimists.

AK: Your book The World Doesn’t End:
Prose Poems (1990), received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. What is it
about prose poems that appeals to you?

CS: Because they’re not like any other kind of writing and thus impossible
to anticipate how they will turn out. I never sit down to write a “prose poem.”
I scribble in my notebooks and some of these scribbles every once in a while
strike me as being able to stand alone and are worth keeping. What shall we
call them? I asked my editor. Let’s call them prose poems, she said, so that’s
what they became.

AK: Is there anything in your poems that has surprised or startled you?

CS: My returning again and again over the years to certain moods and
images like Edward Hopper whose paintings share the same limited subject matter
and the same atmosphere.

AK: How do you see poetry as a place in which the poet can achieve
freedom?

CS: Poetry is freedom. The best poems never imitate, never worry what
other people think. That’s why there’s so much poetry in the world. Where else
would human beings find a place where they can let their feelings and their
imagination run free? That’s what attracted me to poetry when I first started
reading it and writing it fifty-five years ago, and it still does today.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind
While Sitting Down to Write a Poem

from Charles Simic

1. Don't tell the
readers what they already know about life.

2. Don't assume
you're the only one in the world who suffers.

3. Some of the
greatest poems in the language are sonnets and poems not many lines longer than
that, so don't overwrite.

4. The use of
images, similes and metaphors make poems concise. Close your eyes, and let your
imagination tell you what to do.

6. What you are
writing down is a draft that will need additional tinkering, perhaps many
months, and even years of tinkering.

7. Remember, a
poem is a time machine you are constructing, a vehicle that will allow someone
to travel in their own mind, so don't be surprised if it takes a while to get
all its engine parts properly working.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Narrative poetry is poetry that
tells a story and is a long-time favorite among poets and readers. When I was
in fifth grade, everyone in the class was required to memorize and recite “The
Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” a historical narrative by Longfellow. I can
remember memorizing a stanza each week and then, after much practicing with my
parents, getting up in front of the class to recite the whole poem. I still
remember the first few stanzas! Narrative poems can vary in length from very
long to short. Sometimes the stories they tell are quite complex and include
the voices of characters and narrators. Narrative poems from the past, for the
most part, were written in metered verse and include ballads, idylls, lays,
epics

The personal narrative, however,
is different and is popular today among many free verse poets. Often
misunderstood, personal narratives sometimes fail to move beyond the anecdotal
and simply recount an experience that the poet has had. A great personal narrative,
though, has to be larger and more meaningful than an anecdotal poem. In other words,
a great personal narrative can’t rest on its anecdotal laurels and must do more
than simply tell a story. It needs to approach the universal through the
personal, it needs to mean more than the story it tells, and the old rule
“show, don’t tell” definitely applies.

This week let’s try a personal
narrative poem, but right from the get go, let’s set a limit of no more than 30
lines. this may help avoid the pitfall of superfluous details.

1. For starters, decide what true
story from your life you’d like to tell. Think about why you want to write a
poem about this event in your life. Joy down some ideas about the sequence of
the story, the people concerned, and the emotions involved.

2. Plan on writing in the first
person singular, but know that you’re fee to change that later on.

3. Consider the approach you’d
like to take in your personal narrative: chronological, flashback, or
reflective. In chronological, you structure your poem around a time-ordered sequence
of events; in flashback, you write from a perspective of looking back; and in
reflective, you write thoughtfully or “philosophically” about the story you
tell.

4. Don’t simply relate your
narrative or tell your readers what they should feel. Your job is to show and
not to tell. Avoid “emotion words” such as “anger”—bear in mind that when someone
is angry he or she is more likely to slam a door than to say, “Hey, I’m angry.”
You can show anger or any other emotion without ever using the words. Let actions
and sensory images lead your readers to understand the emotions in the poem. As
the writer of a personal narrative poem, it’s your job to include revealing
details, not to interpret or explain them for your readers. You may want to
avoid the passive voice, “to be” verbs, and “ing” endings as these can inhibit
the process of showing rather than telling.

5. Set a tone for your personal
narrative. Tone in poetry is an overall feeling that inhabits every corner of
your poem. Think about your story and the feeling with which you want your
readers to leave the poem.

6. Think about the perspective
from which you want to tell your story. Do you want to tell the story as if it
were happening in the present (using the present tense)? Do you want to write
from a perspective of looking back (past tense)? This is, of course, up to you
and you will need to think about how use of the past or of the present tense
will impact your poem.

7. Just as a short story includes
rising action, a climax, and denouement or resolution, so should a personal
narrative poem. Use of stanzas can be helpful in emphasizing the sequence of
your poem. Be acutely aware that you’re writing a poem and not prose. Narrative
poetry often springs from a prose impulse and becomes mired in prose-like
details. Remember that you’re writing a poem and should be focused on imagery,
figurative language, and the sound quality (alliteration, assonance,
dissonance) of your work. Don’t become so engrossed in the story that you
forget about the elements of good poetry!

Example:

Following is the title poem from Catherine Doty’s book, Momentum. Cat was last week's guest prompter.

Read the poem carefully two or three times. What makes this
such an effective personal narrative?

What has Cat done in the poem to invite the reader into her
experience?

How did you feel when reading the poem? What do you think
Cat wanted you to feel?

How does Cat show without telling?

How does this personal narrative that describes a childhood
experience take you back to your own childhood? What’s the “universal” message
that Cat conveys through her personal experience?

How do the language and imagery enhance meaning?

How does this poem grow so much larger than the simply
anecdotal?

Think about how Cat brought the poem to closure. What does Cat's “dismount” do for the poem? What did it do for your understanding of the poem.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

It’s time again for a guest
prompter, and this week my special guest is poet Catherine Doty. The author of Momentum (Cavankerry, 2004, a volume of
poetry), and Just Kidding (Avocet
Press, 1999, a collection of cartoons that take a humorous look at childhood
through the eyes of a poet), Cat received her MFA in poetry from the University
of Iowa. Her work has appeared in 180
More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, Good
Poems for Hard Times, and many other magazines and anthologies. Her awards
include an NEA Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Marjorie J.
Wilson Award, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and
the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has taught for 30 years as a
poet-in-the-schools, as well as for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the
Frost Place, and other writing programs and conferences.

Cat:

The sonnet is a sweet form:
always good and engaging company, and as happy to be relieved of all but a few
of its skeletal features as to be larded with new and increasingly baroque
ones. Count those syllables! Rebut that argument! Include the name of a condiment
in every line! Sonnets are not-too-big and not-too-small. Like all forms, the
sonnet provides what the poet Marie Ponsot calls “white noise,” that bit of
distraction that can leaven the task at hand. They are good for keeping
narrative lean, and they make elegant containers for all wonderful manner of
weirdness. Some of the various sonnet experiments that follow are borrowed with
thanks from Bernadette Meyer and Layne Browne, some are mine. Check a book on
poetic forms for the requirements of a traditional sonnet, then see how many
you can or wish to retain in following any of the experiments below. For Sonnet Info, Click Here

1. Create a sonnet through the
erasure of another text.

2. Write a sonnet by lineating
found text or prose or a prose poem.

3. Write a sonnet using a poem in
progress of your own that has not yet found its shape.

4. Open a dictionary. Write a
poem using only the text on the page in front of you.

5. Write a sonnet inspired by or
answering another sonnet.

6. Write a homophonic translation
of a sonnet (feel free to experiment with online translation dictionaries).

7. Write in someone else’s voice,
in character, or in a professional language. Be someone else for fourteen lines
of your life.

8. Write a sonnet while listening
to a concert, watching a movie, doing dishes, cooking, or any other activity
demanding your attention. Let the outside leak into your work.

9. Write a sonnet composed of a
series of guesses to an implied, stated or mysterious question/riddle.

10. Write a sonnet that is also a
list poem.

11. Take off your glasses. With
any text just out of your visual range so that you cannot quite make out the
letters, begin guessing and speaking aloud what you can half-see (it helps to
have a scribe write down your words for you). Use this material to enter a
sonnet.

12. Write, in sonnet form, what
you understand to be the way to write a sonnet.

13. Write a sonnet about an
activity you know well, keeping both the rhythm of that familiar activity and
the rhyme demands of the form.

14. Write a sonnet in which
Shakespeare despairs of the Petrarchan sonnet and recreates the form to fit the
poverty of English rhyme (first person optional).

15. Write a narrative sonnet,
slaving to make it as near as possible to perfect. Print it out, cut it into
fourteen strips, then shuffle them to see what else is going on. At this point,
don't feel compelled to keep any imposed form at all.

WELCOME!

THE MUSIC IN IT

"The Music In It" is a blog for anyone interested in poets and poetry—the craft and the community.

The title comes from Countee Cullen, who wrote: "My poetry, I should think, has become the way of my giving out whatever music is in me."

Look for a new prompt or guest blogger every week or every other week, usually posted on Saturdays, and check the archives for older prompts and posts. Be sure to click on the poetry-related links in the sidebar.

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ABOUT NOT ASKING WHAT IF

"Kenny has written some of the most hauntingly beautiful spiritual haiku I’ve ever read—haiku that take us as close to divinity as human language can get. Her haiku are spare and commanding, rich in imagery, and layered with meaning." (Alex Pinto, Tiferet)

“Traditional haiku, environmental haiku, psychological haiku, spiritual haiku—Adele Kenny has done them all. Her haiku are spare and powerful, always nuanced with rich symbolism. Her images and juxtapositions make readers hold their breath in wonder.” (Malachy McCourt, Author of A Monk Swimming)

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WHAT MATTERS

ABOUT WHAT MATTERS

"In Adele Kenny's finely wrought meditations on grief and loss, she never forgets that she's a maker of poems. What Matters straddles two of the exigencies of the human condition: diminishment and endurance. It abounds with poems that skillfully earn their sentiments." (Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize in Poetry)

"These are poems that come to (poetic) grips with the issues of grief, fear, and death ... focused in a new and strong way." (Gerald Stern, National Book Award in Poetry)

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I’m the author of 24 books (poetry & nonfiction) with poems published in journals worldwide, as well as in books and anthologies from Crown, Tuttle, Shambhala, and McGraw-Hill.
I’ve worked as a guest poet for numerous agencies, have twice been a featured reader in the Dodge Poetry Festival, and my awards include two poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council, the 2012 International Book Award for Poetry, and the Distinguished Alumni Award (Kean University). My book, A LIGHTNESS, A THIRST, OR NOTHING AT ALL, is a 2016 Paterson Prize finalist. In March of 2012, I was appointed Poet Laureate of Fanwood, NJ by the Borough Mayor and Council.
A former professor of creative writing in the College of New Rochelle’s Graduate School, I’m founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor for Tiferet Journal. I give readings and conduct both agency-sponsored and private poetry workshops.

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ATTENTION HAIKU POETS

If your area of interest is haiku and its related forms, click the image above for a list of journals (published in various countries) that might interest you.

ON THE TIP OF YOUR TONGUE

Ever find yourself in the middle of a poem and unable to find that one perfect word? Here's the link for a site that provides synonyms, antonyms, related words, similar sounding words, and much more. Easy to use!